Naysayer

Two Fridays ago, Lyda Green, the president of the Alaska state senate, awoke at about 6 A.M. to a call from one of her aides. “She started yelling,” Green said last week, over the telephone from Wasilla, Alaska. “I said, ‘I can’t hear you. What are you saying?’ She finally got it out: ‘McCain has chosen Palin as his running mate!’ I was just silent.”

Since the Palin announcement, a number of intriguing critics of the Governor have gained notoriety. There’s Anne Kilkenny, a voter registrar and housewife who observed Palin up close on the Wasilla city council in the nineteen-nineties. She wrote a long antiPalin missive that coursed through the Internet last week with the speed of one of those viral e-mails tarring Obama. And there’s Mudflats, the anonymous Alaskan blogger who has become a go-to source for Palin muckraking in the liberal blogosphere.

But in the competitive world of Alaskan Palin critics Green stands apart. She’s sixty-nine years old, a conservative Republican who represents Palin’s home town. Palin supported Green when she first ran for the state senate. Unlike some partisan critics, when Green speaks ill of Palin she sounds more like a disappointed grandmother than a political hit woman. Her official biography lists her interests as “family, reading, bridge, piano, traveling, tennis,” and on the morning of the Palin announcement she was sleeping in past six only because she had been up late sewing.

A reporter from the Anchorage Daily News called later that Friday morning, and Green didn’t think twice about rendering her judgment on Palin. “She’s not prepared to be governor,” she said, in comments soon posted on the paper’s Web site. “How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?”

Green and Palin were friends and ideological allies throughout the nineties. “If you had looked at our résumés, as far as being pro-life, pro-N.R.A., pro-family, pro-parental control, saving taxpayer dollars, keeping government out of our lives, we would have been identical,” she said. She traces the chill in their relationship to her decision not to endorse Palin in her 2006 gubernatorial primary. (She stayed neutral.) As governor, Green says, Palin, unlike her predecessors—Democrats and Republicans—has ignored leaders in the legislature and turned every policy disagreement, whether a dispute over a tax on studded tires or a recent debate on rebate checks, into a personal vendetta. “That became her style: in the media implying a negative picture of the legislature,” Green said.

The animosity became public last January, when Palin turned up on an Anchorage shock-jock radio program, “The Bob and Mark Show.” Bob Lester said that he knew Palin believed Green was “a bitch” and “a cancer.” Palin laughed at the comments. “Sarah can be heard in the background tittering, hee-heeing,” Green said, “never saying, ‘That’s not appropriate, let’s not talk like that, let’s change the subject,’ or anything.” Green was devastated. “I worked through it,” she said. “The difficult thing about it was when my children read about it online. They were dumbfounded, because they had known Sarah. I had breast cancer in ’97 and had a radical mastectomy. Sarah certainly knew I had breast cancer, because she sent me flowers when I was ill.”

Green insists that she’s not the only Republican who is stunned by McCain’s decision; she’s just the most vocal about it. Privately, she says, many other Alaskans are as critical as she is. That’s not how it looked down on the floor among her state’s delegates the night that Palin spoke in St. Paul. The Alaskans, who earlier in the week had undergone media training to learn how to stay positive when talking to reporters about Palin, raised “Palin Power” signs and chanted “Drop the puck!” (something to do with hockey). When Palin walked onstage, they yelled, “We love you!” Asked what he thought of Palin’s speech, Lyda Green’s husband, Curtis, said that he and his wife didn’t see it. “No, can’t stand to watch her,” he said. Lyda was more diplomatic. “I had a previous engagement,” she said. “I was watching the U.S. Open.” ♦

Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.